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An Autosegmental/Metrical Analysis of Serbo-Croatian Intonation *

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AN AUTOSEGMENTAL/METRICAL ANALYSIS OF SERBO-CROATIAN INTONATION * Svetlana Godjevac Abstract Based on the qualitative analysis of the Fo contours of wide range ofutterances (broad focus declaratives, broad focus questions, nar­ row focus declaratives, narrow focus questions, vocative chant, and prompting intonation) utterred by nine native speakers, an autoseg­ mental/metrical analysis of Standard Selbo-Croatian intonation is pro­ posed. This analysis argues for sparse specification of tones, contra Inkelas and Zee (1988), and two levels of prosodic phrasing: the phonological word and the intonational phrase. The phonological word is defined in te!lDS of a lexical pitch accent and an initial word boundary tone, whereas the intonational phrase is a domain defined by pitch range manipulations (expansion, compression, reset, downstep) and final intonational phrase boundary_ tones. 1 Introduction Standard Serbo-Croatian (SC) is a pitch-accent language. All analyses (Browne & Mccawley 1965 (B&M), Inkelas & Zee 1988 (l&Z), Kostic 1983, Lehiste & Ivie 1963, •r would like to express my gratitude to Mary Beckman, Chris Barker, Allison Blodgett, Rebecca Her­ man, Molly Homer, Tsan Huang, Ilse Lehiste, Gina Taranto, and Pauline Welby. I also wish to thank my informants: Dragana Aleksic, Ljubomir Bjelica, Ana Devic, Ksenija Djuranovic, Svetislav Jovanovic, Jasna Kragalott, Svetlana Li.kic, and Branislav Unkovic for their patience and kindness in providing the data. All errors are mine. 79 . SVETLANA GODJEVAC 1986 (L&I), Nikolic 1970, Stevanovic 1989, Gvozdanovic (1980), inter alia) recognize four different types of accents: short falling, long falling, short rising, and long rising. In this paper I present an analysis of surface tones of these accent types in different sentential environments, including broad-focus and narrow-focu.s utterances, citation form, vocative chant, prompting intonation, and questions. This analysis is based on the instrumental study of recorded utterance.s by eight native speakers. It is an autosegmentaVmetrical analysis because the F0 shapes are decomposed into their component parts, and the tones and the backdrop pitch range are analyzed in terms of their relations to metrical structure. The general observation differentiating this proposal from earlier autosegmental accounts, is that even the surface tones in SC are sparsely specified to moras, the tone bearing unit in SC. More specifically, the analysis argues for three main innovations over the cited analyses: (i) a decomposition of word tone strings into a demarcative tone, a boundary tone, and accent proper (rather than H-tone spreading and default L-insertion); (ii) bitonal accents with the initial tone starred (i.e, associated to the accented syllable) and the trailing tone unassociated; and (iii) no neutralization ofthe lexical accents in declarative sentence final position. My proposal regarding SC prosodic structure includes two prosodic units: a phonological word and an intonational phrase. Their tonal properties are defined in terms of specification of accents, boundary tones, and pitch-range manipulation. In addition, some observations of more global pitch trends, ·such as downstep, are offered. One reason a refined picture of SC word tones is important is that it serves as the foundation of an ongoing study of the interaction ofintonational effects such as pitch range compression and downstep with syntactic scrambling, word-order focus, etc. These in tum are central to interpretation. The interaction of intonation with interpretation is left for future study. More immediately, this study serves to add to descriptions of prosodic structure. of pitch accent languages, which include Japanese, Norwegian, and Swedish, thereby contributing to the crosslinguistic study of variation in prosody. I argue that SC's four accents are bitonal. The falling accents are H*+L, whereas the rising accents are L*+H, where '*' marks the tone associated with the relevant tone bearing unit within the stressed syllable, as in Bruce's (1977, 199Q) analysis of Swedish word accent. The consequence of this proposal is that the second tone is not linked to a particular mora but is phonologically unassociated. As we will see, a long falling accent may realize-both tones on the stressed syllable, whereas in words with a short falling accent, the trailing tone is usually realized on the poststressed syllable, and sometimes is even truncated. Not all words in SC carry a pitch-accent. Verbal and pronominal clitics, preposi­ tions, and most conjunctions do not bear pitch-accents.1 These words cliticize to an adja­ cent word which does bear a ·pitch-accent to form a phonological word. A phonological 1Zec & Inkelas (1990) assume that the division between phonological words and clitics aligns with the syntactic division into content and function words. This division seems generally right but there _are a few 80 SERBO-CROATIAN INTONATION word is the smallest prosodic unit, and is tonally marked by a pitch accent. (As we'll see, proclitics are marked by a L word boundary tone (which I will mark as %L), but they lack a pitch accent.) In the case of SC, I propose, the relevant tonal marking is a pitch-accent and a %L word boundary tone. As a general rule, .there is maximally one pitch accent and one· %L word boundary tone per phonological word. (As will be discussed in section 4.1.2, there are exceptions to this rule. Some polymorphemic words can be realized with two pitch-accents, but they are in free variation with variants realized with one pitch accent. Proclitics also bring an additional word boundary tone.) That is, a phonological word in SC has exactly one head syllable (marked with lexical pitch-accent) and at least one edge (word boundary) marked tonally. The sentential tune in a declarative utterance under broad focus shows an over­ all downtrend in the pitch level. (By broad focus I mean the sentential tune which lacks prosodic focus. Prosodic focus will be discussed in section 4.2.4.) My as yet unquantified observations of many F0 contours suggest that much of this downtrend can be described as a downstep at each word boundary. That is, the word boundary tone downsteps the suc­ ceeding H target. The final constituent in a sentence then usually ends up in a lower pitch range than any other constituent in the sentence. This cues the end of the sentence. On the basis of instrumental evidence, L&I have pointed out the potential for neutralization of word accents in disyllabic words in this position. l&Z have characterized this phenomenon by the phonological rule ofL insertion whose effect is to erase the tonal lexical distinctions. However, I show, using minimal pairs, that the lexical .tones are still present in this position despite the smaller range for their manifestation (see, sections 4.2.2 and 4.2.4). Therefore, I conclude that a different phonological model is needed from the one l&Z propose. The new model needs to be able to separate the effects of the gradient backdrop pitch trends from cat~gorical tone deletion. As for sentence-level prosody, words under prosodic focus, in narrow focus utter­ ances, show a higher target for the accent H relative to the same utterance without the prosodic focus. This is true both for the starred tone of the falling accents (H*+L) and the trailing tone of the rising accents (L*+H). In summary, in this paper I posit three prosodic units for Serbo-Croatian: a phono­ logical wof.l.l, an intermediate phrase, and an intonational phrase. The declarative sentence pattern of SC shows a continuous alternation between H and L tones. Every phonological word is marked by this pattern, and so is each sentential string. However, the sentence intonation is more than just a concatenation of the word accent tones. The declarative sen­ tence intonation can be accounted for by positing a word-boundary tone, a downstep rule phrase internally, the rule of Qlduction of pitch range in final position, super H targets for excepti,:ms. For example, demonstrative pronouns, which function as determiners, thus function words, do bear a pitch-accent. Some conjunctions, such as pa 'so', iako 'although', ali 'but', etc. also bear an accent. 81 SVETL~NA GODJEVAC discourse-initial segments, and pitch range reduction of post-focus positions. On the basis of contrasts in different melodies, such as declaratives, prompting intonation, and vocative chant, I argue for two different tonal markings of an intonational phrase: two boundary tones, L%, H%, and two phrase accents L- and~ for an intennediate phrase. The paper consists of three major parts. The first major part, section 3, deals with lexical accents and theiF properties; the second part, section 4, is concerned with tonal markings of prosodic structure; and section 5 deals with the issues of interaction between the lexical and structural markings. Section 6 concludes by summarizing the proposed analysis of Serbo-Croatian intonation. 2 Methodology The language that I intend to cover in this paper is the Stokavian-Ekavski variant2 Standard SC. The analysis presented here is a broad outline investigation. It is based on an instrumental investigation of F0 contours for close to 300 utterance types, ranging from citation fonn utterances of single words to three-sentence paragraphs. The intention was to provide a wide coverage of Serbo-Croatian utterance types in order to get an overview of the complete system, as a framework for investigating some specific aspect of the system in a t~orough quantitative analysis with careful control of interaction with other sources of systematic variation. This. purpose is a result of the need for the more overall picture 1 of the system prior to the later quantitative modelling of specific questions. This is in line with the work done by Pierrehumbert (1980), which provided the groundworlc of a complete descripti<;m of the. English intonational system, and which subsequently resulted in the detailed study of pitch range in Libennan & Pierrehumbert (1984).
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